A Survey on Recent Named Entity Recognition and Relationship Extraction Techniques on Clinical Texts
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applied sciences Review A Survey on Recent Named Entity Recognition and Relationship Extraction Techniques on Clinical Texts Priyankar Bose 1,* , Sriram Srinivasan 2,3, William C. Sleeman IV 1,2,3, Jatinder Palta 2,3, Rishabh Kapoor 2,3 and Preetam Ghosh 1,2 1 Department of Computer Science, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA 23284, USA; [email protected] (W.C.S.IV); [email protected] (P.G.) 2 Department of Radiation Oncology, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA 23284, USA; [email protected] (S.S.); [email protected] (J.P.); [email protected] (R.K.) 3 National Radiation Oncology Program, Department of Veteran Affairs, Richmond, VA 23249, USA * Correspondence: [email protected] Abstract: Significant growth in Electronic Health Records (EHR) over the last decade has provided an abundance of clinical text that is mostly unstructured and untapped. This huge amount of clinical text data has motivated the development of new information extraction and text mining techniques. Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relationship Extraction (RE) are key components of information extraction tasks in the clinical domain. In this paper, we highlight the present status of clinical NER and RE techniques in detail by discussing the existing proposed NLP models for the two tasks and their performances and discuss the current challenges. Our comprehensive survey on Citation: Bose, P.; Srinivasan, S.; clinical NER and RE encompass current challenges, state-of-the-art practices, and future directions in Sleeman, W.C., IV; Palta, J.; Kapoor, information extraction from clinical text. This is the first attempt to discuss both of these interrelated R.; Ghosh, P. A Survey on Recent topics together in the clinical context. We identified many research articles published based on Named Entity Recognition and Relationship Extraction Techniques different approaches and looked at applications of these tasks. We also discuss the evaluation metrics on Clinical Texts. Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, that are used in the literature to measure the effectiveness of the two these NLP methods and future 8319. https://doi.org/10.3390/ research directions. app11188319 Keywords: electronic health records; clinical text; natural language processing; named entity Academic Editors: Arturo recognition; relationship extraction; machine learning Montejo-Ráez and Salud María Jiménez-Zafra Received: 7 August 2021 1. Introduction Accepted: 2 September 2021 The amount of text generated every day is increasing drastically in different domains Published: 8 September 2021 such as health care, news articles, scientific literature, and social media. Since 2010, the In- ternational Data Corporation (IDC) has predicted that the amount of data can potentially Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral grow 50-fold to 40 billion terabytes by 2020 [1]. Textual data is very common in most with regard to jurisdictional claims in domains, but automated comprehension is difficult due to its unstructured nature and has published maps and institutional affil- iations. led to the design of several text mining (TM) techniques in the last decade. TM refers to the extraction of interesting and nontrivial patterns or knowledge from text [2]. Common text mining tasks include text preprocessing, text classification, question- answering, clustering, and statistical techniques. TM has become extremely popular and useful in the biomedical and healthcare Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. domains. In healthcare, about 80% of the total medical data is unstructured and untapped Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. after its creation [3]. This unstructured data from hospitals, healthcare clinics, or biomedical This article is an open access article labs can come in many forms such as text, images, and signals. Out of the various text distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons mining tasks and techniques, our goal in this paper is to review the current state-of-the- Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// art in Clinical Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relationship Extraction (RE)-based creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ techniques. Clinical NER is a natural language processing (NLP) method used for extracting 4.0/). important medical concepts and events i.e., clinical NEs from the data [4]. Relationship Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 8319. https://doi.org/10.3390/app11188319 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/applsci Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 8319 2 of 30 Extraction (RE) is used for detecting and classifying the annotated semantic relationships between the recognized entities. Significant research on NER and RE has been carried out in the past both on clinical narratives and other types of text. For example, in the sentence, “Her white count remained elevated despite discontinuing her G-CSF”, the words in bold are the various entities in the sentence. After the entities are recognized, the relationship between two or more entities is extracted. In this case, “her white count” and “elevated” are found to be related to each other in a manner dissimilar to the nature of the relationship between “elevated” and “her G-CSF”. In the sentence “Atorvastatin is found to have therapeutic effects in breast cancer although no clinical trials are performed at present”, the NE of interest includes the name of the drug (atorvastatin) and the disease name (breast cancer), whereas the drug–disease relation (atorvastatin–breast cancer) is the relationship of interest. Figure1 shows a pictorial representation of the association between NER and RE. Figure 1. Association between Named Entity Recognition and Relationship Extraction. 2. Background Over the years, many toolkits and applications have been introduced to address different NLP tasks in the clinical domain, including NER and RE. The WEKA Data Mining Software [5] first came into existence in the late nineties. It was updated several times over the years to include NLP systems for language identification, tokenization, sentence boundary detection, and named entity recognition. Later on, the clinical NLP toolkit, CLAMP (Clinical Language Annotation, Modeling, and Processing) [6] was introduced in 2018 and provides a GUI-based state-of-the-art NLP system. CLAMP achieved good performance on NER and concept encoding and is also publicly available for research use. Comprehend Medical, a NER- and RE-related Web Service (2019) [7], is a very recent effort that introduces an NLP service launched under Amazon Web Services (AWS). Likewise, other research works have also addressed these topics, which motivates this review. A high- level overview of machine learning, neural networks, and evaluation metrics is presented below before we review clinical NER- and RE-related tasks. 2.1. Machine Learning Machine learning (ML) is a type of data-driven Artificial Intelligence (AI) that pro- vides the ability to learn about a system without explicit programming. ML algorithms are applied in many scientific domains and the most common applications include recommen- dation systems, data mining, and pattern recognition. ML is classified into one of the four subdomains: • Supervised Learning: With these algorithms, the training data are given ground- truth labels, which can be used for learning the underlying patterns in the dataset. Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 8319 3 of 30 Classification and regression algorithms are most commonly used, including Naive Bayes [8], Support Vector Machines (SVM) [9], and Decision Trees [10]. • Unsupervised Learning: In this case, the training dataset is not given labels and, thus, many of the solutions attempt to find patterns without any prior guidance. Commonly used algorithms in this category are association rules and clustering methods, such as K-Means [11] or DBSCAN [12]. • Semi-Supervised Learning: Here, only some of the training data is labeled, putting these solutions in a space somewhere between fully supervised and unsupervised learning. Text classification [13] is one of the most common applications for semi- supervised learning. • Reinforcement Learning: Using a reward system, a reinforcement learning agent optimizes future returns based on prior results. This iterative, continuous learning process mirrors how humans learn from their experiences when interacting with an environment. Deep Adversarial Networks [14] and Q-Learning [15] are well known reinforcement learning algorithms. 2.2. Neural Networks The traditional machine learning algorithms often perform well with structured data but can struggle with unstructured or semi-structured data, i.e., human information processing mechanisms such as vision and speech [16]. Neural networks, specifically deep learning algorithms, have shown promising results with NLP and image analysis tasks. In neural networks, the input is processed through different layers of the network, where each layer transforms the features of the dataset following some mathematical function. The concept of neural networks follows the mechanism that the human brain uses to solve a problem. Once the data is processed through different layers within a neural network, the output layer performs the classification. In general, this approach does not require as much human intervention as the nested layers using different hierarchies try to find the hidden patterns on their own. 2.3. Common Evaluation Metrics The F1-score is a popular evaluation metric for the two NLP functions reviewed in this paper. Comparisons can be classified as exact or relaxed match [17]. Relaxed match only considers the correct type and